If you've ever checked out the nearest store with Trek bikes, planned a trip to a Crowne Plaza Hotel, or looked for the best local anything on Yelp, you know that many businesses use Google Maps to help people find where they're located.

Maps can be deployed within your organization to help your employees make fast, informed decisions – such as assessing the location and performance efficiency of your vehicles and other mobile assets. Tracking your assets on Google Maps became easier yesterday when FleetMatics announced that its GPS fleet tracking software is now integrated with Google Maps API Premier.

The FleetMatics solution provides real-time vehicle data, such as start/stop times and speed, to help its users efficiently dispatch to reduce vehicle mileage and downtime. With the addition of Google Maps, FleetMatics now offers the ability to visualize entire fleet locations and easily identify the closest vehicle to a given location.

View the positions and status of an entire fleet on a single screen.

FleetMatics customers can also use Google Maps to find driving directions and optimized routing information, including real-time traffic reports and nearby points of interest.

Drill into a specific vehicle's data, including start/stop times,mileage, and routing information.

According to Jamie Sene of FleetMatics, "Selecting a new mapping provider is not a trivial task. We need an engine that can handle our massive demand across the US and Europe, and we want a partner on the cutting edge of location-based technologies to mirror our own product development. After thorough research, it was clear that only Google Maps satisfied all of these requirements."

Google Maps' familiarity and speed have sparked feedback from Fleetmatic customers, leading to emails like this one: "How do you take an existing product that is miles ahead of its competition and make it even better? By adding Google Maps, of course."